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With all the buzz about content marketing and how wonderful a way it is to earn higher rankings, it's easy to forget about all the other tools that good SEOs and marketers have at their disposal. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers six ways to improve your rankings without spending a dime on content creation and marketing.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I thought I'd address something that's going on in the broader SEO and inbound marketing communities, which is this idea that the only thing that SEOs do anymore is create content and do content marketing. So we build some content and then we go market and we outreach and we try and get people to link to it.

That is truly minimizing the job requirements, which are vast, incredibly vast and much bigger than this idea. So I thought I'd take a little stab and drop a pebble in the ocean of things that SEOs are responsible for by tackling these six ways, six out of probably 600 ways that you can earn higher rankings without investing in content creation or content marketing.

So, first off, number one, you can make your snippets better and your pages serve that intent. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

So basically, in the search results page, this is a very small mockup of that, but I might do a search and I'll see a bunch of titles and then the URL below it and the meta description below that. I might even see an author profile. I might see video snippets. If you've got some rich snippet mark-up, I'll see those in here, and this leads off to your page. By improving both the snippet here, so that could mean adding rel="author",
that could mean adding a video, that could mean adding some rich mark-up, that could mean changing the title, tweaking the title to be a little bit more compelling to click on, changing the description, even actually, surprisingly, changing the URL. Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do contribute to whether people choose to click on them.

Then it's not just about making this compelling, but also making whatever is on that page, whatever is on that snippet match what's on the page that users get to, because as we know, pogo sticking, people jumping off of this page hurts you in two big ways. One, it hurts you because the engines directly look at pogo sticking behavior and go, "Oh, people click on this and then they go back and they don't like it. I'm out of here. I don't want to rank this page." Two, you don't have an opportunity to convert those people into buyers or into potential sharers or linkers to your content.

All right, so number one, completely outside of content creation can seriously move your rankings up.

Number two, improving the crawl friendliness and the pages-of-value ratio on your website.

So I was talking to a very smart SEO over email the other day, and he said something that I loved. He said, "I have never seen and never worked with a large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn't mean significant increases in organic search traffic." I thought that was very wise and well said. That's certainly been the case that I have seen as well, but I liked his phrasing of it in particular. So this idea that, well okay, I've got a good page here, a good page represented by smiley face dude, and smiley face dude is linking out to, well, three not so great pages, pages that Google doesn't particularly want to index. They don't provide a ton of value to them or their searchers or to users in general. It's often the case that websites just have these.

Go and look at your website. I bet you'll click around, and you'll be like, "Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help anybody." Well, if you improve the ratio of those pages, get rid of or toss out or even just remake some of those pages, you can significantly improve your crawl bandwidth and the happiness that Google sees with your site. I'm not just talking about sort of penalties, like Panda, that might affect people who have very large quantities of low quality stuff.

But, in addition to this, in addition to the ratio, you can also look at your navigation. If you've got something like this, so this is a pretty clean navigation system. This one page is linking out to six or seven other pages. That's fine. But what about when I get to this page and he's linking to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links to another page that's actually a duplicate of that first page I was talking about? Improving this kind of stuff, making these models of navigation clean, making your site more indexable, making your navigation get you into deep pages in fewer clicks, and making all of the pages accessible rather than having to go down these wormholes can really improve your site's traffic as well.

Number three, probably the simplest one on the list. You make your pages faster, the Internet will reward you. Some of this is direct. Some of this is Google essentially saying, "Yes, page speed is a very small portion of our ranking algorithm. We do take it into consideration." But a lot of it is not Google directly. A lot of it is users being much happier and doing the same thing we talked about up here, which is reducing your bounce rate, reducing that pogo-sticking activity, and meaning that you have an opportunity to convert a lot more of those people into buyers, sharers, appreciators of your brand.

Number four, I actually really like this one. This is one of my favorite ways to do link building in general, link earning in general, and that is to leverage your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc. I've seen a couple people that I really admire in the field who've basically taken this tactic. They say, "Hey, whenever someone tells us we really love you, we think your service is amazing", they say,
"Thank you so much. That means the world to us, and it would mean even more if you would tell someone about it," your friends, your social network, point to us on your site somewhere.

We don't care if it's a followed link, a no followed link, we're not asking for links. What we're asking for is if you think you've got something great by working with us, by buying our product, by using our service, by interacting with us, we helped you in some way, please share it. That's all I'm asking. I saw it in one woman's email signature. She just said, "If I have ever been helpful to you, it would be awesome if you could share our website."

I don't know what the conversion rate is like for her, but it doesn't even matter if it's 0.001%. That is a bunch more links and shares and help. What a wonderful way to earn the kinds of signals that will help you rank better.

By the way, for a little bit more on this topic and a specific tactic here, check out a blog post I wrote a little while ago called "The Help Me Help You Dinner." It's a little Jerry McGuire I know, but sorry.

Number five, go try this process for me. Identify the pages on your site that make people happy but that aren't earning organic search traffic. Here's what I mean. They've got high engagement, a low bounce rate, a good number of visits, a high browse rate, meaning people are clicking and visiting other pages after them, but they don't get organic search traffic.

This actually happens quite a bit, that you see pages like this. Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes the culprit here is that the keyword targeting and the keyword optimization just isn't there. Essentially, these are pages that are created not by SEO folks or by SEOs who just kind of forgot or were targeting keywords that have long since stopped being searched for. Go improve those. Go find the keywords that those pages should be ranking for and then update the page, the titles, the content a little bit. You usually shouldn't have to tweak much of the content at all on the page in order to get the targeting right and dialed in just a little bit. Sometimes you might even change the URL, and then you can do a URL rewrite or a 301. That's fine too.

If you're doing a more significant update process, go ahead and relaunch and reshare it as well, especially if a lot of people have forgotten about it or search engines have forgotten about it. Just that update, just that freshness signal can help you get a little bit more in your rankings.

Last thing I'll mention. I don't know where the ideas come from that classic link building is entirely dead. It's not, and one of the things that is truly still alive and still very powerful is what I call classic competitive style link building. I recognize that kind of low-quality guest posting and directory link building and a lot of these other more manual, scalable features have really gone away, but classic competitive link building is still just as valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can earn from those places too.

So go and use your favorite link building tool. We like Open Site Explorer or Fresh Web Explorer if you're looking at sort of things that have been just recently published. We do have a tool as well called Link Intersect that helps you find pages that two or more of your competitors are linked to by but you have not been, those kinds of things. I think Majestic SEO also has a feature like that, so you can check them out.

Then you create this sort of prioritized list for outreach and starting to try to contact some of these people. What I recommend, because a lot of people get disheartened if they go to the first guy and there's just a bunch of hoops that they have to jump through and it's very hard to find any contact information and then it's very hard to get a response and when you do get a response, it's negative, and you can just get beaten down.

What I like to do, therefore, especially because getting links from a diverse group of places is often more valuable than just getting one or two here or there, is to go ahead and prioritize the list by how easy you think it will be. If there's a journalist who's already following you on Twitter and they've written about some of your competitors and you figure they're going to keep writing about this topic, why wouldn't they write about you?
Great! Do a little bit of outreach. Ask them what you can do to be a feature in the next story. It's probably a relatively simple one. If there's a page that's listing resources of the kind that you already have, great, go reach out to them. That's probably a very simple one.

This sort of stuff and hundreds more like it are all in the realm of what modern SEOs still have to be doing in addition to the newer obligations that we have around content creation and content marketing, all of this social media work and those kinds of things. So I try not to forget any of this, but I know that we have a lot of other obligations as well.

I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next time. Take care.

108 Comments

nice to see you talking about what many may consider already known SEO stuff. Maybe what you're saying is not 100% new or so sexy as can be designing a content strategy done with fuzzy nice inventions, BUT I think that this WBF is very needed.

For instance, point 2 is dramatically true and quite outstandingly overseen by the big majority of the site that, for instance, I audit. In fact, I can easily affirm that a good 70% of my auditing time is "lost" in understanding the hellish IA and ontology of my clients' site. In the video you talk just about one issue derived by a bad IA, but - if we look at the first reason of the big majority of the issues a site may have, we will find out that it is a bd Information Architecture:

Bad link equity flow

Bots loosing themselves into internal loops and alleways

Conversion pages buried at the end of an hypertrophic categorization

Keyword cannibalization

...

I personally believe that the world of SEO is substantially affected by a manic-depressive syndrome. If we see that Google hits just one of the "classic" SEO practices, then we consider that Google hit all of them, hence we look at new ways of earning traffic, forgetting what could be considered basics.

If we see that marketing is important (and it is), then we go working just "doing marketing", and forget that we have to deal with a medium with very specific technicalities that, if we forget them in the name of the over-abused "Content is King" mantra, are essential for making our site standing against the competitors' ones.

Mmm... they may rank well, but do they convert as well? Are pages ranking for the same keywords cannibalizing and dispersing the conversion opportunities the traffic generated by those rankings is offering?

Yes, they rank well. I optimized in Germany: Wedesigner + City with about 20 cities and for most cities the sub site rank well. Plus it ranks well for the German term "webdesigner" (engl. web designer)

If you work with .gov’s or .edu’s, provide a testimonial and gain a super-power backlink - it works a treat as public organisations love positive feedback that they can share online ;)

As your suggestions and the above are mostly technical, boardroom sign-off can be simpler as the majority of the work is done by the SEO, with less collaboration required with different departments. The ROI can be more trackable and faster too :)

"Go and look at your website. I bet you'll click around, and you'll be like, "Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help anybody."

Those pages are just a waste of online real-estate. If you've got a bunch of pages that aren't helping anyone or serve some greater business purpose then why bother keeping them around? Either make them valuable or get rid of them.

Number 5 was the best point in my opinion, I see clients all the time that ask why they don't rank for 'keyword their city' I look they have a great backlink profile from huge authorities in their niche but they don't have any pages that are targeting that city. Instead they are targeting the major city nearby and struggling for rankings when they could probably rank in the city they are based in with a couple hours of work!

I totally agree Brad. The conversion for the actual city you are located in would also be much higher. I hate when I do a search for a local business in my area and I see a local landing page for a company located 30 minutes away. Fortunately, because of pogo-sticking and local search becoming more advanced, I have seen many of these "local SEO" tactics become ineffective. As an SEO it can be frustrating to explain to a client that they will no longer rank well for the local big city because of these updates, but at the same point I also respect the fact that this was a problem with user experience. Location is king.

I think go over the titles could help a lot. So many title wich are not up to date on so many websites.
The point 5 is a good one, on some content you never expected much interests and you simply have done no keyword research...

Addition: on many sites (mostly blogs) we also see the problem, that many posts write nearly the same things. Redirect them (301) to the one most relevant wich make the users happy helps a lot. On many blogs there are these forgotten sites, thats nearby point 2 what a great tipp is.

Hey, that's a brilliant idea. Instead of weeding out old content that isn't visited so well or has a bigger bounce rate to 301 redirect it to newer content. Adding Links to the newer posts from the older posts might help too if you don't want to 301 redirect.

Another amazing insight Rand. So, overall we need to analyze website which pages have higher potentials to drive traffic and tweak those pages to get much higher click through or increase engagement. Beside this, clearance of non performing page is crucial. This is like "de-fragmentation process" we run in our computer to increase performance of the computer. Than you.

i thought @Tony Dimmock mentioned some pointers to focus on SEO are quite vital as many points like 301 instead 302, page speed, TLD's and URL re-structuring is quite a good way to get ranked high in search engines. but according to my point of view i would also add page content by analysing LSI keywords for the page which we are going to optimized.

This WBF was extremely essential at this point of time. As all SEO folks have now engaged themselves in what can be said as following Google path and not thinking out of the box, Your WBF is a boon for making things look simple. Steve Jobs rightly said that , "Simple Can Be Harder Than Complex" and I see that when you talk about website navigation and clean HTML here. A normal user being flooded with lot of contents and the one that delights needs to be made well navigated.

Participating (not spamming) in relevant forums is also a great way to drive traffic and increase your authority in your industry. I realize that this is arguably a form of "content," but it is quite simple none the less.

I really like the example of the woman who mentioned "share if I ever provided value to you, etc." in her email signature.

That's definitely an easy way to remind your customers and fans to share your content with others, for free. It costs zero dollars and it's so effective! There's nothing better than word-of-mouth referrals because it signifies your loyal fans doing premium marketing, just for YOU. I always get honored when I hear about a new fan, customer, follower, that heard about me through another person. It brings a smile to my face and lets me know that I did something right. I think, "I'm actually providing a good service/product that people are willing to advocate on my behalf!"

Don't underestimate Facebook as well. I'm part of the younger demographic that is addicted to Facebook, so this may not apply as well to other generations...but I have to say that it can only help. I always try to remind myself that my status messages are being seen by hundreds of people. (I mix it with casual and professional statuses, so it really depends on how I feel that day). But when I post "professional" or more business/life oriented status updates that give out advice, anecdotes, tips...I always make sure to over deliver and provide a value-rich piece of work. After all, your friends are clicking on your link or spending their time to read your status update. Make it worth it! And become known as the person who keeps bringing gold! It's your chance to make one of your acquaintances into friends, or followers into fans! Don't count the likes or shares...eventually if you're that good, then it will be shared dozens, if not hundreds and thousands of times.

Brilliant blog i have set all metatags and descriptions and keywords set myself up on google and registered with various search engines and local listings but cant seem to get myself on the top listings yet. can anyone help my site is walknpaddle.co.uk. i have not recieved my google reg code as yet but google does recognize my site.

Thanks for sharing these tips Rand. I enjoyed watching your video. I think I have to focus on identifying pages on my site that makes people happy and exert more effort to make it more visible to my readers. You look great on that mustache by the way :)

This is truly "odd" to me - if you "do SEO", not a single part of this should be something new. This should ALL be part of your standard approach or more accurately, "what you do". What Rand has essentially put forward is

1) Better meta:: Ensuring that extra info is there for users in the SERPS (snippets) + show trustworthiness up front and back that trust up with the page matching the promise. [be helpful from the get go]

3) Make it as fast as possible - not for Google, mostly because people are impatient. [users like it]

4) Get into networking. If you're producing helpful stuff, people naturally want kudos for introducing their friends to such helpful stuff. [People like to find/provide answers to help folks. Visitors like that help. Do more of it]

5) Ensure your content is current. Keep awesome content targeted to what folks look for. [Ensure your best works are ABLE to be helpful to users]

6) If you think you're good, ask for links. Similar to #4. [Nudge folks towards #4]

I could simplify all this with one piece of advice that I've followed for 10+ years: forget search engines, and do things that advance their REAL interests: the best possible experience for the visitor.

It seems everyone is so stuck on RANKING well, that they've missed the point. ALL the algorithms in the world don't mean a damn - the intent behind them is what matters and that hasn't changed since day #1

:: What actions do humans take on/with that page and what does that mean? Get answer & apply that user-judgment. ::

Yahoo & google jointly proved that you can't manually review & vet content - it's why Google is what it is today in fact. Google have always stated that all solutions must scale. So how do you vet the data of the world (their mission is to collect the data of the world)? By figuring out how to judge the actions of the population of the world.

I've been doin SE work since before Google mattered. I can still recall the day they were 7% of search referral traffic to one of my sites (the red pill...). I've never had a penalty, never lost traffic, never had an issue.

On link building: I've never done it - don't need it. But it falls into the same bucket. What's a link? A human, sitting down with their editor and taking the time to code a href tag. Translation: "I like this site. It is relevant. I think it's helpful enough that I'm willing to send some of my traffic to it." Forget the link - work with the idea of WHY is has value! The link is the indicator, not the metric.

Forget the engines guys. Focus on the intent of what they're trying to achieve. Do better for users. SEO & conversion theory are one and the same. And remember: "cool SEO tactics to rank better" are better described as "ways to temporarily scam Google". Given that Google are slightly brighter than most of us (sarcasm, anyone?), it's a fair bet that this is stupid. Play by their rules, do the things they want (not necessarily measure today) - it's easier.

If you are looking for short term ranking then you need build backlinks as much as you can, you will get result for short term and after sometime your site will become worst.If you would like to survive in today's modern SEO then start improving yourself and follow this instruction. First of all On-page is one of the most important factor in SEO. Its 60% On Page and 40% Off Page, You just need to reset site structure and right Metas and when you will find your site ranking around in first five pages. Afterwards you just need to create few but quality links and you are up in Google.

I think they could have easily called this Whiteboard Friday "Way to Optimize Your Website That You May Have Forgot". Good suggestions Rand, although I am still on the fence about some of the value of link building going forward as Google has increased the cadence of its updates.

Hi Rand and more likely a helpful Mozzer, @ around 2 mins you said "Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do contribute to whether people choose to click on them." got any links to studies referred to?

Whilst it's intuitive that a pretty URL will have a higher CTR, it's always useful to see the data. Thanks.

I would like to appreciate for the Ideas of Content Marketing. I was finding the best ways for it from the last few months; some people say it is spammy process to google but I believe that if you make confident with better planning then why worry to Google! Thanks Rand Fishkin for this effective post.

I just removed a bunch of pages on our site a few days ago... great minds? Anyway, great stuff. We've been investing a lot in content, but that doesn't mean we can neglect other parts of our job. SEO isn't a one-trick pony, and although Google wants great content for their users, sometimes they can't find it if it's covered by a bunch of neglected 'SEO weeds.' :)

@Rand: I always learn something new in every friday episode. So, I am thankful to you.

We all know page speed & some other attributes like crawling management matters a lot. But I can't believe any tactics among these can beat better content planning. Optimized content is still the king to rank batter in serp.

Happy Friday Rand/Moz. All great ideas for tweaking, especially for established sites that have a great base of content to grow from.

If sites are starting and have limited existing content, then creating great, differentiated content and strategically sharing to content with content-hungry curators looking to feed the every hungry social media monsters is probably a better use of time. In addition to words, content can be videos (YouTube #2 search engine), infographics, podcasts or slideshare for example. Find the hole (search audience demand++, content--) and, fill those holes with great, high-quality content. Repeat.

In terms of tweaking, making sure your blog RSS feed is working may not effect rankings, but can have a profound impact on distribution.

Great video. It's true that some times we forget about the other strategies we have excluding content marketing. I think that's because content creation and the social media outreach you for it is a time consuming task and we need lots of focus to make it work properly. Thanks for reminding us of a few of the other SEO strategies out there.

Ok, ok. But SEO is as well about ranking or mainly about ranking. And of course optimizing the entry so you have more visits. Don't be so pernickety :-) Or do you mean "Online Marketing" than you should use this term (Online Marketing).

I agree with you Rand but not totally, content creation and marketing is important now a day. Ya its true that if you can increase your page speed, and manage clean URL structure but content is a important factor. we can't ignore content creation and marketing.

No argument! I'm a huge proponent of content, but I wanted to share this video because many folks have been swinging the pendulum too far and thinking that SEO is becoming nothing but content marketing, and that's just not right.

I agree Rand, Now a day many folks thinking that Content marketing is everything in seo and its only way to rank higher in search engine. its not a true. Content marketing is part of SEO not a heart of SEO.

I think what Rand has in mind is that, there are many companies who think content is the king, So Rand Clarifies that content is not the one which help you in ranking, It's just a single part and you need to consider the other which he has explained.

It is a totally unique area of Marketing that helps SEO and it is helped by SEO.

A content marketer not necessarily is an SEO, but SEO helps the effectiveness of his job, as his job may serve also SEO objectives (i.e.: earning links).

At the same time an SEO in not necessarily a Content Marketer, but an SEO may help Content Marketers discovering new opportunities, channels and ideas thanks to his data informed (not just data driven) natural attitude, apart all things related to the SEO facet of Content optimization.

If Content Marketing and SEO are part of something, than that something is Inbound Marketing or Internet Marketing

We have a number of content contributors in our office, what do they do, well the write stuff - simple!.

Their material will goes nowhere without SEO activities (amongst others) supporting and exercising it's distribution. To be honest our content writers are not even interested in the practice of SEO. From their perspective they write and we broadcast it across the companies communication channels.

Not to beat a dead horse but to give an example. A former employer of mine has about 30 people in house working on creating content for marketing and (as of now) no one focused on SEO. For the last couple of years they have spend more time and money focusing on Content Marketing and virtually no time on SEO basics. The result is that their rankings have suffered and are continuing to suffer because of this.

Lesson learned? Content Marketing is important but without focusing on creating and maintaining a solid SEO foundation across your site you could just be pissing in the wind.

Website Optimization looks like your home improvements, no need to do any thing extra. Same applies in SEO. On-page SEO which includes all things towards optimization your website is complete in itself.

I had written one article that how people can promote their website which has no budget for SEO.

Many business owners and agencies that don't really understand SEO have gone from one misconception to another: from keyword stuffing to content stuffing.

Developing quality content takes time and resources, and while those are being debated and worked out, Rand's hit list is a great place to start.

For any tactic that we use, there needs to be a purpose. I spend a lot of effort explaining how or why basic SEO tactics contribute to the client's marketing goals. All beautifully explained in general terms in this WBF.

It's not a case of "ignoring" them... I think what Rand's getting at is that there are other things to try, especially if you're working with a client who struggles with content creation, for example. It's to remember that there's always plenty of other opportunities - content isn't the be-all-and-end-all.

I think it has already a positive effect when the brand is mentioned somewhere else. Like in discussion boards, question and answer sites, customer review sites etc. I guess it works as well when a short form of the link is mentioned without actually being a clickable link.

Furthermore I think you can do local seo by putting the company in yellow pages type site, working with the Google places (or Google plus profile), Google map reviews, putting in the address in the footer etc.

Great stuff Rand, and thanks for reminding people of the vast amount of areas SEO's cover. Good points for people to check though. On a client’s site we have successfully implemented 1, 2, and 3. of your tips with good results...

1. successfully ranked in top positions for a number of book titles in a review section. We also had rich snippet data with star ratings appearing in the SERPS. Looking to switch over to an improved plugin, but to keep that all important /review/ in the URL structure, which must contribute to click-throughs.

2. site architecture, and link structure improved. We were also seeing a massive number of crawl errors in Moz Analytics due to Buddypress. This was corrected and Google was a lot happier!

3. We improved Site speed & performance. The site was buckling under the weight of numerous plugins and bloated code and in the red in Google Page Speed Insights.

All of the above definitely improved rankings across the board and were worthwhile in implementing (and all with no new content!)

Great White Board Friday!! These 6 points are really helpful for every SEO.

There are a lot more you can do to earn higher rankings without investing in Content Creation. Such as Broken link building, direct outreach to ask for link, interact with bloggers or PR authors through social media and ask them to share your site with their audience whether in the form of blog post or only share it directly. Or a lot more onsite changes can effect your rankings as well.

Thanks for this reminder Rand, it's always important to keep in mind that "basics" are still fundamental for good search optimization. And since content strategy and creation can be quite resource consuming, it's something that can be done easily and yield great results. I recently performed a site wide update of a client's targeting strategy and with just changes to our page titles, meta descriptions and a few on-page updates, we saw a 40% increase in organic traffic within a few weeks.

I really like numbers 2 and 5! I think those two are the most unique tips you offered here today.

I agree that many SEOs are focusing on the one hype at the moment (content marketing), but thanks for the reminder that there's so much more to this. I really agree with your points about the "crawlability" for your site. If a search engine bot can't crawl your site properly, that's usually a good indicator that you have a navigation problem.

Hi Rand thank you very much for another useful article. Really that's brilliant idea.I think that u have to translate it and publis on my blog about SEO Uzmanı. Thank you very much again for the article.

The ebbs and flows of the SEO industry seem to be some of the biggest "swings" compared to any industry. While everyone is pushing the importance of content and content marketing - as they should be - it's so important to not forget some of the more technical, still extremely important "SEO stuff" that gets the job done wonderfully.

Great article, however my competitor is gaining the number one spot by using old technique of blog commenting with the same anchor text on every comment and keyword stuffing with hundreds of the same keyword on his main page. WHat am I missing?

Over the years I have gotten a lot of links by looking at where my competitors are listed. Also, not only your competitors, but you can use tools to look at similar sites in your niche and see where they are listed and use tools like Open Site Explorer to go after those links.

With Matt Cutts recently posting that Google is increasingly exploring opportunities to rank search results without a link graph, in a way that still provides a great user experience, it seems clear that signals off-site are getting increasingly more complex. I think it's a great opportunity for marketers to take a hard look at re-evaluating ways to improve the site's performance through on-site metrics. From crawl errors and page speed, to continually tweaking landing pages and structured data, there are a lot of great things that can be done on-site to see some incredible results!

My favorite thing you mention here is encouraging customers to share positive experiences or sentiments about a brand via social media or their own sites. Regardless of the value of the link, it's a great way to build awareness and a little nudge for people who may be on the fence to become first-time users. I have a client with a testimonial page, and we recently scheduled some social media posts focusing on sharing some recent testimonials and corresponding products to try and increase conversions. So far we have seen an increase in requests for brochures coming from a channel that typically didn't convert as well.

I always smile when I hear marketers talk about journalist/influencer outreach and not giving up when you get rejection. PR pros have been getting this heat for a long time! I love seeing the intersection of PR and marketing and the practices that are bringing them together (SEO, content marketing). Coming from both worlds, I really appreciate the marketing tools out there (like Open Site Explorer, Buzzsumo, even Google Analytics) that can improve "PR" outreach.

All SEO guys already follow these steps like snippets, page speed, clean URL structure, link building and Content marketing too. So we cannot totally ignore Content creation.. I like point 5 of finding those pages in website that have low bounce rate, more traffic but low organic searches.